<Begin Segment 10>

SF: If your family had enough money, you probably would have gone on to college, right?

JF: I probably would have, yeah. Lord knows what I would have turned out to be. I don't think I would have made very much of an engineer. I'm not sure. Although I'm pretty good at theorizing things. But I could see in the newspaper business there were a lot of options there, all of which I liked. I liked to read, and I was a fast reader and I was fair at spelling and I could look up things in the dictionary fairly fast. So I found that that was, my first job was filing photographs. Every photograph that was used, I would clip that out of the paper and paste the caption on the back of the picture that had been used. And maybe the picture was worth saving. If it was, it was filed. If it weren't, it was thrown away after sixty days or something like that. And then I would, plus the hundreds and hundreds of pictures that we got in from the different wire services, and my, the librarian, Ms. Deutsch would select the pictures that she wanted to keep, and I, I would file those in different alphabetical orders. We, we became very good friends, Ms. Deutsch and I. And in fact, I became friends with everybody who was in that library, and I liked them all. But I mean, in a male-dominated business world, and in the particularly male-dominated business such as newspapers, why, she was the head of the library, which speaks pretty highly of her.

And we had a business editor named Pinkney McLean, Britisher. Big, tall, fastidious man. And he was a good friend of Ms. Deutsch. And she knew I was interested in writing heads. So she talked to Mr. McLean. He had been a fighter pilot in World War I, by the way. He was a fascinating man. But she talked to him, and he would let me come in on my half-hour lunch breaks and write heads on business stories. So he had time to critique and so forth. So I learned quite a bit about that from him, and helped him out some. Then I started doing that on the regular copy desk, and a copy desk in the newspaper is the, the copy reader is the last person who handles the copy before it's set in type. When it leaves his hands it's supposed to be, have a headline written on it, and then everything is supposed to be there. If it's not, why, you make, or try to make sure that it gets in the story or fill up any holes that the reporter might have left in the story. You don't do it, but you ask the city editor, and it goes down, back down to the reporter who wrote the story.

So I started volunteering -- I would work, we worked six days a week in those days, and I would work days on the, on Saturday mornings for the Sunday paper, and then I would work the rest of the shift until the paper closed down at night, for free on the copy desk. So I learned a lot that way. And we finally got a company union in about 1939. I think it was '39 or '40, I'm not sure which. And they set up a, apprentice copy desk man, reporter and photographer. And there were two other guys, a guy who wanted to be a photographer. He was doing the same thing I was doing in the photographic field. He was out chasing ambulances and taking pictures, and this other guy was writing news stories as often as he can as a copy boy. And we were very interested in making those our careers. So we got those apprenticeships. And all three of us were pretty successful. I was getting paid $20 a week, but the apprenticeships only paid $19.50, so I took a fifty cent pay raise -- pay cut. But at the end of a year's apprenticeship, the salary jumped up to $36 a week, which was pretty good money in those days.

SF: Do you think it'd be a fair summary to say that you saw the potential in the newspaper business and you sort of went that way because of the kind of, intellectual challenge or, that the field might have offered you?

JF: Well, I guess you would call it an intellectual challenge. I'm not quite sure I would ever think of it that way when I was eighteen years old. But what I could see was I could get on the rim of the copy desk, and I could then become the copy desk boss, and who knows where that would lead, see. So I could, I could see a definite series of steps that I could take. And that, that intrigued me. I mean, it was very possible. I had a lot of, I guess enthusiasm, and I was a hard worker, and all that went with my Irish grandmother's teaching. And I was never late, thanks to my Italian grandmother. And so I had all these things going for me, and I did, I think I did pretty well for a guy who never finished high school -- I mean, never finished college.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.